We have all had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and quickly discovering that you are “connected” by an unexpected chain of acquaintances, often a short chain of only two or three people. In fact this occurrence is so common that we have a catch phrase response that most everybody uses “It's a small world,” and even a play based on the phenomena, John Guare's “Six Degrees of Separation.”
With the U.S. population just over 290 million and almost 6 billion more in the rest of the world, how can this “small world phenomena” be such a common occurrence, and is there a way to systematically employ it to our benefit?